You're all protesters

A favorite pastime of mine while on the tube, after flicking aimlessly through the metro looking in vain for anything vaguely interesting, is to write small messages on the side of particularly infuriating articles. One of my most recent little additions was made to an article that heavily suggested that Boris Johnson was responsible for the open house weekend, when it was actually started in 1992.


For me this is no more than a way to pass the time while giving the newspaper editors a very small and polite kick in the teeth. However it occurred to me that in its own way my little habit, one which I am ironically a little embarrassed of (I always pull the paper up so no one can see what I’m writing), is my own way of protesting against wrongs that I see in the world.

Yesterday I chanced upon a sticker near the south bank picturing an oyster card with the name oyster changed to voyeur. This seemed to me to be in the same vein as my note writing and it got me thinking about how many people are out there making these little protests. I then started asking people “what do you do that you could consider a protest”, and I discovered that everyone I asked did something that could constitute a protest if not every day then definitely every week.


I guess what I’m trying to say is that in our own way we all protest every day, when we disregard a stupid rule or we refrain from buying a certain product. I like to think that in there own little way they change the way the people around us think and that simply expressing yourself is in the end the best way to change the world.

so what do you do?